Lawmakers Say Brownback's Budget Plan Doesn't Add Up

A state senator looks over Gov. Sam Brownback's proposal to boost school spending without a tax cut, something lawmakers were quick to criticize as unworkable.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen
/ Kansas News Service

Fellow Republicans on Wednesday characterized Gov. Sam Brownback’s spending plan — more than $6.6 billion a year — as a beeline return to deficits and an abdication of responsibility in a budding crisis.

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The governor, poised to leave for a spot in the Trump administration, unveiled a five-year, $600 million increase in school funding Tuesday evening. When lawmakers dug into that proposal Wednesday, they griped about key details.

For one, they found irony in Brownback relying on a two-year $1.2 billion tax hike passed last year. After all, the governor vetoed it and forced his own party’s leaders to muster an override.

For another, even that money isn’t enough. It will only edge up toward Brownback’s school funding goal in the first two years. By the summer of 2019, the state would stare down another deficit. The governor’s plan doesn’t explain where Kansas would find even more school dollars in years three, four and five.

“This is not balanced,” said Republican Rep. Troy Waymaster, head of the House budget committee. “We’re going to have to find a way to balance the budget.”

Sen. Laura Kelly, a Democrat on the Senate budget committee who is running for governor, called it “mean-spirited” to make lawmakers clean up the mess.

“We’re going to have to be the bad guys,” she said.

Salina conservative J.R. Claeys, one of the Republican representatives who stood by Brownback’s 2012 signature tax cuts when others united to undo them last summer, tweeted that Brownback had “waved the white flag of surrender from the dome, and tossed every ally he had left under the bus.”

Brownback long touted the principles of small government and economic growth through tax cuts, but is now promising schools a growing piece of a pie made bigger through tax hikes.

Recap: the governor’s budget spends the tax hike, sweeps the state highway fund, robs KPERS, transfers from the CIF. Last night’s sunshine and puppy dogs speech comes crashing back to earth this morning. (And still won’t satisfy the court). #ksleg

The money-for-schools problem dwarfs all other friction points politicians will debate in the months ahead, but the state budget has other far-reaching ramifications. Among the moves Brownback proposed for the two-year spending plan:

Increasing Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and nursing homes by $40 million. That would broaden access to health care without expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income adults, an effort that Brownback vetoed last year.

Paying Kansas teachers, by 2023, better than what their counterparts earn in all four neighboring states. Average pay is $47,775, about $200 behind Missouri, and $3,500 behind Nebraska, Kansas is already well ahead of Colorado and Oklahoma.

Teacher pay in Kansas rose an estimated 4 percent this year because of court-ordered funds, but districts say the real key to hiking salaries beyond that would depend on the state sending them more money year after year.

Letting students take 15 college-level credits for free while still in high school, and offering them the ACT college entrance exam or a similar work-skills test for free. If 80 percent of students take the state up on its offer, it would cost a little more than $25 million.

The college credit idea is similar to a 2012 Brownback initiative that let high-schoolers into technical colleges for free. The program grew rapidly and is now underfunded, so the governor wants to fix that with an infusion of $15 million.

Graduating 95 percent of high-schoolers by 2023 in exchange for the school funding boost — and doubling the number who pursue post-secondary studies.

Promising $1.5 million in raises to the more than 1,300 state employees who fell through the cracks last year when the Legislature increased pay. State workers fought for raises for years, and many had received none since 2008. Another $8 million would go toward prison worker pay after prison riots last year revealed crisis-level understaffing.

Related Content

Jim McLean of the Kansas News Service gives a recap of the 2018 State of the State address.

Gov. Sam Brownback, poised to leave Kansas after a generation of dominating its politics, on Tuesday called for steep infusions of money into public schools — spurring fellow Republicans to accuse him of raising hopes with a “fairy tale.”

Brownback said the state can add $600 million over the next five years — without a tax hike.

A Kansas Supreme Court ruling saying the state must spend more on schools could require lawmakers to find hundreds of millions of dollars. With some lawmakers saying a tax hike for education remains off the table, that financial hunt won’t be easy.